Leon Trotsky Literature and Revolution Quotes Wall Art Nature
Leon Trotsky
Literature and Revolution
Chapter eight
Revolutionary and Socialist Art
Greater Dynamics Under Socialism – The "Realism" of Revolutionary Art – Soviet Comedy – Old and New Tragedy – Arts Technique and Nature – The Reshaping of Man
WHEN one speaks of revolutionary art, ii kinds of creative phenomena are meant: the works whose themes reflect the Revolution, and the works which are not connected with the Revolution in theme, simply are thoroughly imbued with it, and are Colored past the new consciousness arising out of the Revolution. These are phenomena which quite evidently vest, or could belong, in entirely unlike planes. Alexey Tolstoi, in his The Road to Calvary, describes the period of the State of war and the Revolution. He belongs to the peaceful Yasnaya Polyana school, only his scale is infinitely smaller and his point of view narrower. And when he applies it to events of the greatest magnitude, it serves only as a cruel reminder that Yasnaya Polyana has been and is no more. But when the young poet, Tikhonov, without writing most the Revolution, writes nigh a piffling grocery store (he seems to be shy about writing of the Revolution), he perceives and reproduces its inertia and immobility with such fresh and passionate power as merely a poet created past the dynamics of a new epoch tin can practise. Thus if works about the Revolution and works of revolutionary art are not i and the same thing, they still have a point in mutual. The artists that are created by the Revolution cannot but want to speak of the Revolution. And, on the other paw, the fine art which volition exist filled with a great desire to speak of the Revolution, volition inevitably reject the Yasnaya Polyana signal of view, whether it be the signal of view of the Count or of the peasant.
There is no revolutionary art as however. There are the elements of this fine art, there are hints and attempts at it, and, what is most important, there is the revolutionary man, who is forming the new generation in his own prototype and who is more and more in need of this art. How long will it accept for such art to reveal itself Clearly? It is difficult even to approximate, considering the process is intangible and incalculable, and we are limited to guesswork even when nosotros try to time more than tangible social processes. But why should not this art, at least its showtime big wave, come soon equally the expression of the art of the immature generation which was born in the Revolution and which carries it on?
Revolutionary art which inevitably reflects all the contradictions of a revolutionary social system, should non be confused with Socialist art for which no footing has as yet been made. On the other hand, 1 must non forget that Socialist art will grow out of the art of this transition menstruum.
In insisting on such a stardom, nosotros are not at all guided by a pedantic consideration of an abstract program. Not for nothing did Engels speak of the Socialist Revolution every bit a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. The Revolution itself is not as yet the kingdom of freedom. On the contrary, it is developing the features of "necessity" to the greatest caste. Socialism will abolish class antagonisms, besides equally classes, only the Revolution carries the class struggle to its highest tension. During the menses of revolution, only that literature which promotes the consolidation of the workers in their struggle against the exploiters is necessary and progressive. Revolutionary literature cannot but be imbued with a spirit of social hatred, which is a artistic historic factor in an epoch of proletarian dictatorship. Under Socialism, solidarity will be the basis of society. Literature and art volition be tuned to a unlike cardinal. All the emotions which we revolutionists, at the present time, experience apprehensive of naming – so much have they been worn thin by hypocrites and vulgarians – such as disinterested friendship, love for one's neighbor, sympathy, will be the mighty ringing chords of Socialist poetry.
However, does not an excess of solidarity, equally the Nietzscheans fear, threaten to degenerate man into a sentimental, passive, herd animal? Non at all. The powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois guild, has the character of market contest, will not disappear in a Socialist social club, simply, to use the language of psycho-analysis, volition be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile grade. There will be the struggle for one's opinion, for 1's projection, for one's taste. In the measure out in which political struggles will be eliminated – and in a order where there volition be no classes, there will be no such struggles – the liberated passions will be channelized into technique, into construction which also includes art. Art and so volition become more general, volition mature, will become tempered, and will become, the most perfect method of the progressive edifice of life in every field. It will not be just "pretty" without relation to anything else.
All forms of life, Such as the tillage of land, the planning of human habitations, the building of theaters, the methods of socially educating children, the solution of scientific problems, the cosmos of new styles, volition vitally engross all and everybody. People will separate into "parties" over the question of a new gigantic culvert, or the distribution of oases in the Sahara (such a question will exist also), over the regulation of the weather and the climate, over a new theater, over chemical hypotheses, over two competing tendencies in music, and over a best system of sports. Such parties will not be poisoned by the greed of grade or degree. All will be equally interested in the success of the whole. The struggle will have a purely ideologic graphic symbol. It will accept no running after profits, it will have nothing mean, no betrayals, no blackmail, none of the things that grade the soul of "contest" in a gild divided into classes. But this will in no manner hinder the struggle from being absorbing, dramatic and passionate. And as all issues in a Socialist society – the problems of life which formerly were solved spontaneously and automatically, and the bug of art which were in the custody of special priestly castes – will become the holding of all people, one can say with certainty that collective interests and passions and individual contest will have the widest scope and the most unlimited opportunity. Fine art, therefore, will not endure the lack of any such explosions of collective, nervous energy, and of such commonage psychic impulses which make for the creation of new artistic tendencies and for changes in style. It will be the aesthetic schools effectually which "parties" will collect, that is, associations of temperaments, of tastes and of moods. In a struggle and so disinterested and tense, which volition have place in a civilisation whose foundations are steadily ascension, the human personality, with its invaluable bones trait of continual discontent, will grow and become polished at all its points. In truth, we take no reason to fear that at that place will exist a reject of individuality or an impoverishment of art in a Socialist society.
Tin can we christen revolutionary art with any of the names that we accept? Osinsky somewhere chosen it realistic. The idea here is true and significant, but there ought to be an agreement on a definition of this concept to prevent falling into a misunderstanding.
The most perfect realism in fine art is coincident in our history with the "gilt age" of literature, that is, with the archetype literature of the noblemen.
The period of tendentious themes, when a work was judged primarily past the social ideals of the author, coincides with the menstruum when the awakening intelligentsia sought an outlet to public action, and tried to make a union with the "people" against the sometime regime.
The Decadent school and Symbolism, which appeared in opposition to the "realism" which ruled before them, represent to the period when the intelligentsia tried to divide itself from the people and began to worship its own moods and experiences. Though, in fact, it submitted itself to the bourgeoisie, it tried not to dissolve itself into the bourgeoisie psychologically or scientifically. In this cause Symbolism invoked the aid of Heaven.
Pre-war Futurism was an attempt of the intelligentsia to rise out of the wreck of Symbolism, while even so property on to individualism, and to find a personal pivot in the impersonal conquests of cloth culture.
Such is the crude logic of the succession of the large periods in the development of Russian literature. Each one of these tendencies contained a definite social and group attitude towards the world which laid its print upon the themes of the works, upon their content, upon the selection of environment, of the dramatic characters, etc. The idea of content does non refer to subject matter, in the ordinary sense of the term, only to social purpose. A lyric without a theme can limited an epoch or a form or its point of view every bit well equally a social novel.
And then there comes the question of form. Within certain limits, this develops in accord with its own laws, like any other technology. Each new literary school – if it is really a school and not an arbitrary grafting – is the result of a preceding development, of the craftsmanship of word and color already in existence, and only pulls abroad from the shores of what has been attained in order to conquer the elements afresh.
Development is dialectic in this instance, too. The new tendency in fine art negates the preceding one, and why? Patently in that location are sentiments and thoughts which feel crowded inside the framework of the former methods. But at the same fourth dimension, the new moods find in the already old and fossilized art, some elements which when further developed can give them adequate expression. The banner of revolt is raised against the "old" every bit a whole, in the name of the elements which can be developed. Each literary school is independent potentially in the past and each one develops by pulling away hostilely from the past. The relation between class and content (the latter is to exist understood not simply as a "theme" only every bit a living complex of moods and ideas which seek artistic expression) is determined by the fact that a new course is discovered, proclaimed and adult nether the force per unit area of an inner need, of a commonage psychological need, which, like all man psychology, has its roots in lodge.
This explains the dualism of every literary tendency; on the one hand, it adds something to the technique of fine art, heightening (or lowering) the general level of craftsmanship; on the other hand, in its concrete celebrated course, it expresses definite demands which, in the terminal analysis, have a class character. We say form, but this also means individual, because a grade speaks through an individual. Information technology too means national, because the spirit of a nation is determined by the class which rules it and which subjects literature to itself.
Permit the states accept up Symbolism. What is it understood to hateful: is it the fine art of transforming reality symbolically, a method of artistic cosmos in form? Or is information technology that particular symbolic tendency which was represented by Blok, Sologub, and others? Russian Symbolism did not invent symbols. It only grafted them more closely to the organism of the modernized Russian language. In this sense, the future fine art, no matter what lines information technology volition follow, will not wish to reject the Symbolist heritage in course. Merely the actual Russian Symbolism of sure definite years made utilize of the symbol for a precise social purpose. What was its purpose? The Decadent schoolhouse, which preceded Symbolism, sought the solution of all creative problems in the personal experiences of sex activity, expiry, and the residue, or rather of none only sex and expiry. It could not but exhaust itself in a very short time. From this – not from social impulses – followed the demand to discover a college sanction for one's demands and feelings and moods, and and so to enrich and elevate them. Symbolism, which made of the symbol not but a method of art, but a symbol of faith, seemed to the intelligentsia the artistic bridge to Mysticism. In this concretely sociologic sense, and not in whatever abstruse formal sense, Symbolism was not merely a method of artistic technique, but the intelligentsia'south escape from reality, its way of constructing another globe, its artistic bringing upwardly in self-sufficient day-dreaming, contemplation and passivity. In Blok we notice Zhukovsky modernized! And the old Marxian symposiums and pamphlets (of 1908 and after) on the subject of the "literary refuse", no affair how crude and one-sided some of their generalizations may have been, and no matter how they tended to mere scribbling, gave an incomparably more pregnant and correct social literary diagnosis and prognosis than Chuzhak did, for instance. He gave thought to the trouble of course sooner and more attentively than many other Marxists, only because of the Influence of the current schools of art, he saw in them the growing stages of a proletarian culture, and not the stages of the intelligentsia's growing estrangement from the masses.
What are we to understand under the term realism? At various periods, and by various methods, realism gave expression to the feelings and needs of dissimilar social groups. Each one of these realistic schools is subject field to a separate and social literary definition, and a separate formal and literary interpretation. What take they in common? A definite and of import feeling for the world. Information technology consists in a feeling for life every bit information technology is, in an artistic acceptance of reality, and not in a shrinking from information technology, in an agile Involvement in the concrete stability and mobility of life. It is a striving either to moving-picture show life as it is or to idealize information technology, either to justify or to condemn it, either to photograph it or generalize and symbolize it. But it is always a preoccupation with our life of iii dimensions as a sufficient and invaluable theme for art. In this large philosophic sense, and not in the narrow sense of a literary schoolhouse, i may say with certainty that the new art volition be realistic. The Revolution cannot alive together with mysticism. Nor can the Revolution live together with romanticism,if that which Pilnyak, the Imagists and others call romanticism is, as it may be feared, mysticism shyly trying to establish itself under a new name. This is non being doctrinaire, this is an insuperable psychological fact. Our age cannot take a shy and portable mysticism, something similar a pet canis familiaris that is carried along "with the residuum". Our historic period wields an axe. Our life, roughshod, violent and disturbed to its very bottom, says: "I must have an artist of a unmarried love. Whatsoever fashion y'all take hold of me, whatever tools and Instruments created by the evolution of fine art you choose, I leave to you, to your temperament and to your genius. But yous must understand me as I am, you must take me as I will get, and at that place must be no one else besides me."
This means a realistic monism, in the sense of a philosophy of life, and not a "realism" in the sense of the traditional arsenal of literary schools. On the contrary, the new creative person volition need all the methods and processes evolved in the past, as well as a few supplementary ones, in order to grasp the new life. And this is not going to be artistic eclecticism, because the unity of art is created by an active world-attitude and active life-attitude.
In 1918 and 1919, it was not uncommon to meet at the front a war machine division with cavalry at the head, and wagons carrying actors, actresses, stage settings, and other phase properties in the rear. In general, the identify of art is in the rear of the historic advance. Because of the rapid changes on our fronts, the wagons with actors and phase properties institute themselves frequently in a difficult position, and did not know where to get. At times they fell into the easily of the Whites. No less hard at present is the position of all fine art, caught by the violent change on the celebrated front.
The theater especially is in a hard position for it absolutely does not know where to go and what to "show". And information technology is most remarkable that the theater, which is peradventure the near conservative form of art, should have the nearly radical theorists. Everyone knows that the most revolutionary group in the Union of Soviet Republics is the form of dramatic critics. At the first sign of a revolution in the West or in the East, information technology would exist a skillful thing to organize them into a special armed forces battalion of Levtretsi (Left theatrical reviewers). When our theaters present The Daughter of Madame Angot, The Death of Tarelkin, Turandot, The Cuckold, then our venerable Levtretsi attempt to be patient. But when it comes to giving Martinet's play they about all rise on their hind legs (fifty-fifty earlier Meyerhold gave The World On Its Hind Legs). The play is patriotic. Martinet is a pacifist! And one of the critics even expressed himself in this wise: "This is all passé for us, and therefore of no interest." Simply all this "Leftism" is horrible philistinism, without an ounce of revolutionism behind it. If nosotros are to begin, from the standpoint of politics, then Martinet was a revolutionist and an internationalist, when many of our present-day representatives of the extreme Left had not fifty-fifty begun to smell Leftist blessings. Moreover, what does it mean to say that Martinet's piece belongs to yesterday! Has the social revolution in French republic already taken identify? Is information technology already victorious? Or shall we consider a French revolution not an contained celebrated drama, merely simply a boresome repetition of what has happened to us? This Leftism covers, besides many other things the commonest national narrowness. There is no question only Martinet's play is as well long in spots, and that information technology is more literary than dramatic (the author himself hardly expected that the play would be put on the stage). But these defects would have remained in the groundwork if the theater had taken this play in its national and historic simplicity, that is, as a drama of the French proletariat at a certain point in its keen march, and non as a sketch of a world that is on its hind legs. To carry over the activeness of a definite historic milieu into an abstract constructivism, is in this case a deviation from the revolution – from that existent, true revolution which is developing obstinately and moving from country to country, and which appears, therefore, to some pseudo-revolutionists as a boresome repetition.
I practise not know whether the phase needs bio-mechanics at the present time, that is, whether there is a historic necessity for it. Only I take no dubiousness at all – if I may speak my ain indicate of view – that our theater is terribly in need of a new realistic revolutionary repertory, and above all, of a Soviet comedy. We ought to have our own The Minors, our own Woes from Being Too Wise, and our own Inspector General. Not a new staging of these three old comedies, non a retouching of them in a Soviet style, as for a carnival parody, though this would be more vital than ninety-ix per cent of our repertory – no; nosotros need only a Soviet one-act of manners, one of laughter and of indignation. I am using the terms out of the old literature text-books on purpose, and I am not in the to the lowest degree afraid of being accused of going backwards. A new class, a new life, new vices and new stupidity, demand that they shall exist released from silence, and when this will happen nosotros volition take a new dramatic fine art, for information technology is impossible to reproduce the new stupidity without new methods. How many new minors are tremblingly waiting to be represented on the stage? How much woe is there from being too wise, or from pretending to be too wise, and how good it would exist if a phase Inspector General would walk across our Soviet life. Please do not point to the dramatic censorship, because that is not true. Of grade, if your comedy will effort to say: "Run into what nosotros have been brought to; permit u.s. become back to the nice quondam nobleman's nest" – then, of course, the censorship will sit down on your one-act, and will exercise so with propriety. Only if your one-act will say: "We are building a new life now, and yet how much piggishness, vulgarity and knavery of the old and of the new are about united states of america; let u.s.a. make a clean sweep of them", then, of course, the censorship will not interfere, and if information technology will interfere somewhere it volition practice so foolishly, and all of u.s. will fight such a censorship.
When, rare every bit information technology was, I had occasion to sentry the stage, and politely hid my yawns so as non to offend anyone, I was strikingly impressed with the fact of how eagerly the audience defenseless every hint now-twenty-four hours life, even the about insignificant. A very interesting manifestation of this tin can be seen in the operettas revived past the Art Theater, which are skittish with big and little thorns (there is no rose without thorns!). It occurred to me and so that if nosotros were not yet grown enough for comedy, we should, at to the lowest degree, stage a revue!
Of course, no dubiousness, and it goes without saying, in the future the theater volition sally out of its 4 walls and will merge in the life of the masses, which will obey absolutely the rhythm of bio-mechanics, and then forth, then forth. But this, after all, is "futurism", that is, music of a very distant future. Only betwixt the past on which the theater feeds, and the very distant hereafter, there is the nowadays in which nosotros live. Between Passéism and Futurism, it would be well to give "Presentism" a run a risk behind the footlights. Let us vote for such a trend! One good Soviet comedy will awaken the theater for a few years to come up, and then peradventure we will accept tragedy, which is truly considered the highest course of literature.
Just can a great fine art be created out of our infidel epoch, ask certain mystics, who are willing to take the Revolution if information technology tin can secure them immortality. Tragedy is a great and monumental course of literature. The tragedy of classic antiquity was deduced from its myths. All ancient tragedy is penetrated past a profound faith in fate which gave a pregnant to life. The Christian myth unified the awe-inspiring fine art of the Center Ages and gave a significance not simply to the temples and the mysteries, just to all human relationships. The union of the religious point of view on life with an active participation in it, made possible a corking art in those times. If one were to remove religious faith, non the vague, mystic buzzing that goes on in the soul of our modern intelligentsia, but the real religion, with God and a heavenly law and a church bureaucracy, then life is left blank, without any place in information technology for supreme collisions of hero and destiny, of sin and expiation. The well-known mystic Stepun approaches art from this point of view in his article on Tragedy and the Contemporary Life. He starts from the needs of art itself, tempts us with a new and monumental art, shows us a revival of tragedy in the distance, and, in conclusion, demands, in the name of art, that we submit to and obey the powers of heaven. There is an insinuating logic in Stepun's scheme. In fact, the author does not intendance for tragedy, because the laws of tragedy are nothing to him equally compared to the laws of heaven. He simply wishes to take hold of concur of our epoch past the small-scale finger of tragic aesthetics in order to take hold of its entire hand. This is a purely Jesuitic approach. But from a dialectic indicate of view, Stepun's reasoning is formalistic and Shallow. It ignores the materialistic and historical foundation from which the aboriginal drama and the Gothic fine art grew and from which a new art must grow.
The faith in an inevitable fate disclosed the narrow limits within which ancient man, clear in thought merely poor in technique, was confined. He could not as however undertake to conquer nature on the scale we do today, and nature hung over him like a fate. Fate is the limitation and the immobility of technical means, the vocalization of blood, of sickness, of death, of all that limits homo, and that does not let him to become "arrogant". Tragedy lay inherent in the contradiction between the awakened earth of the heed, and the brackish limitation of means. The myth did not create tragedy, information technology only expressed information technology in the language of man'southward childhood.
The ransom of spiritual expiation of the Center Ages and, in general, the whole system of heavenly and earthly double bookkeeping, which followed from the dualism of religion, and especially of historic, positive Christianity, did not make the contradictions of life, only only reflected them and solved them fictitiously. Mediaeval society overcame the growing contradictions by transferring the promissory note to the Son of God; the ruling classes signed this note, the Church hierarchy acted as endorser, and the oppressed masses prepared to disbelieve it in the other world.
Conservative society broke up human relationships into atoms, and gave them unprecedented flexibility and mobility. Archaic unity of consciousness which was the foundation of a monumental religious art disappeared, and with it went primitive economic relationships. As a result of the Reformation, religion became individualistic. The religious symbols of fine art having had their cord cut from the heavens, vicious on their heads and sought support in the Uncertain mysticism of individual consciousness.
In the tragedies of Shakespeare, 'which would be entirely unthinkable without the Reformation, the fate of the ancients and the passions of the mediaeval Christians are crowded out by individual human passions, such as love, jealousy, revengeful greediness, and spiritual dissension. But in every ane of Shakespeare'due south dramas, the private passion is carried to such a high degree of tension that it outgrows the individual, becomes super-personal, and is transformed into a fate of a sure kind. The jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth, the greed of Shylock, the love of Romeo and Juliet, the arrogance of Coriolanus, the spiritual wavering of Hamlet, are all of this kind. Tragedy in Shakespeare is individualistic, and in this sense has not the full general significance of Oedipus Rex, which expresses the consciousness of a whole people. None the less, compared with Aaeschylus, Shakespeare represents a great footstep forward and not backward. Shakespeare's art is more human. At any rate, nosotros shall no longer accept a tragedy in which God gives orders and homo submits. Moreover, there will be no ane to write such a tragedy.
Having broken upward human relations into atoms, bourgeois guild, during the period of its ascension, had a neat aim for itself. Personal emancipation was its name. Out of it grew the dramas of Shakespeare and Goethe'due south Faust. Man placed himself in the center of the universe, and therefore in the center of fine art likewise. This theme sufficed for centuries. In reality, all modernistic literature has been nothing but an enlargement of this theme.
But to the degree in which the internal bankruptcy of bourgeois society was revealed as a event of its unbearable contradictions, the original purpose, the emancipation and qualification of the individual faded away and was relegated more and more into the sphere of a new mythology, without soul or spirit.
However the conflict between what is personal and what is across the personal, tin can take place, not merely in the sphere of religion, simply in the sphere of a human passion that is larger than the private. The super-personal element is, to a higher place all, the social element. So long as man will not have mastered his social arrangement, the latter volition hang over him as his fate. Whether at the same time society casts a religious shadow or non, is a secondary matter and depends upon the caste of man'southward helplessness. Baboeuf's struggle for Communism in a society which was not yet ready for it, was a struggle of a classic hero with his fate. Baboeuf's destiny had all the characteristics of true tragedy, merely every bit the fate of the Gracchi had whose name Baboeuf used.
Tragedy based on detached personal passions is too flat for our days. Why? Because we alive in a period of social passions. The tragedy of our period lies in the conflict between the private and the collectivity, or in the conflict betwixt two hostile collectivities in the same private. Our age is an historic period of bully aims. This is what stamps it. But the grandeur of these aims lies in human'due south effort to complimentary himself from mystic and from every other intellectual vague. ness and in his effort to reconstruct society and himself in accordance with his own plan. This, of course, is much bigger than the child's play of the ancients which was condign to their kittenish age, or the mediaeval ravings of monks, or the arrogance of individualism which tears personality away from the collectivity, and then, draining it to the very bottom, pushes it off into the abyss of pessimism, or sets it on all fours before the remounted bull Apis.
Tragedy is a loftier expression of literature considering it implies the heroic tenacity of strivings, of limitless aims, of conflicts and sufferings. In this sense, Stepun was correct when he characterized our "on the eve" fine art, every bit he called it, that is, the art which preceded the War and the Revolution, as insignificant.
Conservative gild, individualism, the Reformation, the Shakespearean dramas, the great Revolution, these accept made impossible the tragic significance of aims that come up from without; dandy aims must live in the consciousness of a people or of a class which leads a people, if they are to arouse heroism or create a basis for great sentiments which inspire tragedy. The Tsarist War, whose purpose did not penetrate consciousness, gave birth to cheap verse only, with personal poesy trickling by its side, unable to rise to an objectivity and unable to grade a groovy art.
If one were to regard the Decadent and the Symbolist schools, with all their off-shoots, from the point of view of the evolution of art as a social form, they would appear merely as scratches of the pen, as an exercise in craftsmanship, every bit a tuning up of instruments. The menstruation in art when it was "on the eve" was without aims. Those who had aims had no time for art. At nowadays, one has to carry out great aims past the means of art. I cannot tell whether revolutionary art will succeed in producing "high" revolutionary tragedy. But Socialist art will revive tragedy. Without God, of course. The new art will exist atheist. It volition also revive comedy, because the new homo of the time to come will want to express mirth. It volition give new life to the novel. It volition grant all rights to lyrics, because the new man will honey in a better and stronger way than did the old people, and he will call up well-nigh the problems of nascence and death. The new art will revive all the old forms, which arose in the course of the development of the creative spirit. The disintegration and turn down of these forms are not absolute, that is, they exercise not hateful that these forms are absolutely incompatible with the spirit of the new age. All that is necessary is for the poet of the new epoch to re-think in a new way the thoughts of flesh, and to re-experience its feelings.
In these latter years, architecture has suffered most of all, and this is true not only of our country lone; old buildings have been gradually destroyed, and new ones have not been built, Hence the housing crisis the earth over. When work was resumed after the War, the people directed their energies, first of all, towards the virtually essential articles of consumption, and only secondarily towards the reconstruction of basic capital and houses. Ultimately, the destructiveness of wars and revolutions volition requite a powerful impetus to architecture, in the same mode as the burn down of 1812 helped to adorn Moscow. In Russia, the cultural material to be destroyed was less than in other countries, the devastation was greater than in other countries, while the rebuilding is immeasurably more difficult than in other countries. It is not surprising, then, that nosotros take had no time for architecture, 1 of the virtually monumental of arts.
Now we are beginning to repair the pavements a little, to re-lay the sewage pipes, to cease the unfinished houses left to us as a heritage – merely nosotros are only kickoff. We made the buildings of our Agricultural Exhibition out of woods. Nosotros must still put off all big-scale construction. The originators of gigantic projects, men like Tatlin, are given involuntarily a respite for more idea, for revision, and for radical re-examination. Simply one must not imagine that we are planning to repair quondam pavements and houses for decades to come. In this procedure, equally in all other processes, at that place are periods of repair, of slow preparation and accumulation of forces, and periods of rapid development. As before long as a surplus will come afterwards the almost urgent and astute needs of life are covered, the Soviet country volition take upwards the problem of gigantic constructions that will suitably express the awe-inspiring spirit of our epoch. Tatlin is undoubtedly right in discarding from his projection national styles, allegorical sculpture, modeled monograms, flourishes and tails, and attempting to subordinate the entire design to a correct effective utilize of material. This has been the mode that machines, bridges and covered markets have been congenital, for a long time. But Tatlin has still to prove that he is right in what seems to exist his own personal invention, a rotating cube, a pyramid and a cylinder all of drinking glass. For skillful or bad, circumstances are going to requite him enough of fourth dimension to notice arguments for his side.
De Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower, in which no one is forced to imitate him. But information technology is undoubtedly truthful that the Eiffel Tower makes a dual impression; one is attracted by the technical simplicity of its form, and, at the same time, repelled by its aimlessness. It is an extremely rational utilization of material for the purpose of making a high structure. Only what is it for? It is not a building, but an do. At nowadays, as everyone knows, the Eiffel Tower serves as a radio station. This gives it a pregnant, and makes it aesthetically more unified. But if the tower had been built from the very beginning as a radio station, it probably would accept attained a higher rationality of form, and and then therefore a college perfection of art.
From this signal of view Tatlin'south project for a monument appears much less satisfactory. The purpose of the master building is to make glass headquarters for the meetings of the World Quango of People's Commissars, for the Communist International, etc. Only the props and the piles which are to support the drinking glass cylinder and the pyramid – and they are there for no other purpose – are then cumbersome and heavy that they await like unremoved scaffolding. One cannot remember what they are for. They say: they are at that place to support the rotating cylinder in which the meetings will take place. But one answers: Meetings are not necessarily held in a cylinder and the cylinder does not necessarily have to rotate. I call back seeing once when a kid, a wooden temple built in a beer canteen. This fired my imagination, merely I did not enquire myself at that time what it was for. Tatlin proceeds by a opposite method; he wants to construct a beer bottle for the World Council of People's Commissars which would sit in a spiral physical temple. But for the moment, I cannot refrain from the question: What is information technology for? To be more exact: we would probably have the cylinder and its rotating, if it were combined with a simplicity and lightness of construction, that is, if the arrangements for its rotating did non depress the aim. Nor tin can we hold with the arguments which are given to translate the artistic significance of the sculpture past Jacob Lipshitz. Sculpture must lose its fictitious independence, an independence which only means that information technology is relegated to the backyards of life or lies vegetating in dead museums, and it must revive in some higher synthesis its connection with architecture. In this broad sense, sculpture has to assume a utilitarian purpose. Very practiced, then. But it is not at all clear how one is to approach the Lipshitz sculpture from such a point of view. I accept a photo of several intersecting planes, which are supposed to be the outlines of a man sitting with a stringed musical instrument in his hands. We are told that if today it is non commonsensical, it is "purposeful". In what way? To judge purposefulness, one has to know the purpose. But when one stops to remember of the purposefulness and possible utility of those numerous intersecting planes and pointed forms and protrusions, i comes to the decision that, as a concluding resort, one could transform such a piece of sculpture into a lid-rack. Still, if it had been the sculptor's plan to make a sculptured hat-rack, he would accept probably found a more than purposeful grade for information technology. At whatsoever charge per unit, we cannot recommend that a plaster-cast exist made of it for hat-racks.
We must therefore presume that the Lipshitz sculpture, like the discussion-forms of Kruchenikh, are merely exercises in technique, like the playing of scales and passages. They are exercises in the exact and sculptural music of the time to come. Only one should not hand exercises out as music. It is ameliorate not to allow them out of the studio, nor to bear witness them to a lensman.
There is no dubiousness that, in the time to come – and the farther we go, the more than true it will be – such monumental tasks as the planning of city gardens, of model houses, of railroads, and of ports, will interest vitally not only engineering science architects, participators in competitions, just the large popular masses every bit well. The imperceptible, pismire-like piling upwardly of quarters and streets, brick past brick, from generation to generation, will requite style to titanic constructions of urban center-villages, with map and compass in mitt. Around this compass volition be formed true peoples' parties, the parties of the future for special engineering science and structure, which will arouse passionately, hold meetings and vote. In this struggle, compages will once more be filled with the spirit of mass feelings and moods, only on a much higher plane, and mankind will brainwash itself plastically, information technology will become accustomed to wait at the world every bit submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life. The wall between art and industry will come up downward. The great style of the time to come will exist formative, non ornamental. Here the Futurists are right. But it would be wrong to wait at this as a liquidating of art, every bit a voluntary giving way to technique.
Take the penknife as an example. The combination of art and technique can go along along 2 cardinal lines; either art embellishes the knife and pictures an elephant, a prize dazzler, or the Eiffel Belfry on its handle; or art helps technique to discover an "ideal" form for the knife, that is, such a form which will correspond most adequately to the material of a knife and its purpose. To think that this job can be solved by purely technical means is wrong, because purpose and material permit for an innumerable number of variations. To make an "ideal" knife, ane must have, besides the knowledge of the properties of the material and the methods of its apply, both imagination and taste. In accord with the entire tendency of industrial civilization, we think that the creative imagination in creating material objects will be directed towards working out the ideal class of a thing, as a thing, and non towards the embellishment of the affair as an aesthetic premium to itself. If this is true for penknives, it will be truer nonetheless for wearing wearing apparel, furniture, theaters and cities. This does not hateful the doing abroad with "motorcar-made" art, not even in the most distant future. But it seems that the direct cooperation between art and all branches of technique volition become of paramount importance.
Does this mean that industry will blot art, or that art will lift industry up to itself on Olympus? This question can exist answered either mode, depending on whether the problem is approached from the side of industry, or from the side of art. Only in the object attained, there is no difference betwixt either answer. Both answers signify a gigantic expansion of the scope and creative quality of manufacture, and we understand here, nether manufacture, the entire field without excepting the industrial activity of man; mechanical and electrified agriculture will besides go office of industry.
The wall volition fall not only between art and manufacture, but simultaneously betwixt art and nature also. This is not meant in the sense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that art will come nearer to a state of nature, but that nature will become more "artificial". The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Homo has already made changes in the map of nature that are non few nor insignificant. Only they are mere pupils' practice in comparison with what is coming. Organized religion merely promises to motility mountains; but technology, which takes naught "on faith", is actually able to cutting down mountains and move them. Upwardly to now this was washed for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic program. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and volition earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he volition take rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have non the slightest fear that this taste volition exist bad.
The jealous, scowling Kliuev declares, in his quarrel with Mayakovsky, that "it does not behoove a maker of songs to carp about cranes", and that it is "only in the furnace of the heart, and in no other furnace, that the imperial gold of life is melted." Ivanov-Razumnik, a populist, who was once a left Social-Revolutionist – and this tells the whole story – as well took a hand in this quarrel. Ivanov-Razumnik declares that the verse of the hammer and the auto, in whose name Mayakovsky speaks, is a transient episode, but that the verse of "God-made World" is "the eternal poesy of the world". Globe and the automobile are here contrasted equally the eternal and temporary sources of poetry, and of course the eminent idealist, the tasteless and cautious semi-mystic Razumnik, prefers the eternal to the transient. Just, in truth, this dualism of globe and motorcar is false; i tin contrast a astern peasant field with a flour mill, either on a plantation, or in a Socialist society. The verse of the globe is not eternal, but changeable, and man began to sing articulate songs merely after he had placed between himself and the earth implements and instruments which were the showtime elementary machines. There would have been no Koltzov without a scythe, a plow or a sickle. Does that mean that the world with a scythe has the advantage of eternity over the earth with an electric plow? The new man, who is just now beginning to program and to realize himself, will not contrast a barn-floor for grouse and a drag.internet for sturgeons with a crane and a steam-hammer, every bit does Kliuev and Razumnik afterwards him. Through the automobile, homo in Socialist society volition command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will bespeak out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the grade of the rivers, and he volition lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will exist a bore, just that is why they are simpletons. Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will exist turned into parks and gardens. Nearly likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where human being commands them to remain. And man will practise information technology so well that the tiger won't fifty-fifty notice the machine, or feel the modify, but volition live as he lived in earliest times. The auto is not in opposition to the earth. The machine is the instrument of modern human being in every field of life. The present-day city is transient. Only it will not be dissolved dorsum again into the quondam village. On the opposite, the village will rise in fundamentals to the plane of the city. Here lies the principal task. The city is transient, simply information technology points to the futurity, and indicates the road. The present village is entirely of the past. That is why its aesthetics seem archaic, equally information technology they were taken from a museum of folk art.
Flesh volition come out of the period of civil wars much poorer from terrific destructions, fifty-fifty without the earthquakes of the kind that occurred in Japan. The effort to conquer poverty, hunger, want in all its forms, that is, to conquer nature, will be the dominant tendency for decades to come. The passion for mechanical improvements, as in America, will accompany the first stage of every new Socialist gild. The passive enjoyment of nature volition disappear from art. Technique will become a more powerful inspiration for artistic work, and later on the contradiction itself betwixt technique and nature will be solved in a higher synthesis.
The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic and for educating human being himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this outlook. Having rationalized his economical system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not exit a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and pedagogy, which lies like a millstone on the present-twenty-four hour period family unit, will be removed, and will go the subject field of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at final free herself from her semi-servile condition. Adjacent with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, volition accept its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful "parties" will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social pedagogy and an emulation of unlike methods will take identify to a degree which has not been dreamed of before. Communist life will non be formed blindly, similar coral islands, only will exist built consciously, will be tested by idea, will be directed and corrected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Homo, who will learn how to movement rivers and mountains, how to build peoples' palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will non only be able to add together to his ain life richness, brilliancy and intensity, simply also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The beat of life volition inappreciably have time to form before information technology will burst open up over again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the futurity will not be monotonous.
More than than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business organization to achieve beauty by giving the motility of his ain limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He volition try to principal beginning the semiconscious and so the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he volition try to subordinate them to the command of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become bailiwick to collective experiments. The human being species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, volition once more than enter into a country of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, volition get an object of the most complicated methods of artificial choice and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Homo first collection the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbaric routine by scientific technique, and faith by science. Later he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and grade with commonwealth and rationalist parliamentarianism and so with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements accept settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from at that place also, by ways of the Socialist system of economical life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family unit life. Finally, the nature of man himself is subconscious in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative idea and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race volition not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in society later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to reach a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more than proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fright of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man's extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the farthermost asymmetry in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.
Man will make it his purpose to master his ain feelings, to enhance his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into subconscious recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new aeroplane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if yous delight, a superman.
Information technology is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the human of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-concrete self-education will become two aspects of 1 and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process cute form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Human volition become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more than rhythmic, his vox more musical. The forms of life will get dynamically dramatic. The boilerplate man type volition rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks volition ascent.
THE Stop
Literature & Revolution Index
Last updated on: 6.ane.2007
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Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch08.htm
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